The present invention relates to data acquisition applications and more particularly to an improved method and corresponding apparatus for optimal decoding for data acquisition applications of Sigma Delta modulators.
Sigma Delta (.SIGMA..DELTA.) modulators as Analog-to-Digital (A/D) converters have received considerable attention from the signal processing community. Their attraction lies in the trade-off provided between sampling rate and resolution of the in-loop quantizer--specifically, they can achieve the same or higher resolution as multibit quantizers operating at the Nyquist rate by employing a low-resolution quantizer operating at many times the Nyquist rate. In practice, the low-resolution quantizer is usually one-bit because of its ease of implementation and the inherent linearity of two levels.
.SIGMA..DELTA. modulators generally require fewer and simpler components than comparable converters of different types, and are robust against circuit imperfections. Furthermore, they obviate the need for stringent analog anti-aliasing filtering, and relegate the strict processing demands to the digital domain. They are thus attractive for VLSI implementation of relatively low-bandwidth signal processing applications, such as speech and audio.